Devin Curtis > Devin's Quotes

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”
― Gilbert Sorrentino

“Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“Swam ashore, man, like a duck; I can swim like a duck, I'll be sworn.”
― William Shakespeare

“I remember that on the day before you left, I told you that I wanted to change my way of life, and you asked me why I didn’t resign from my company right away. This is no place for me to go into details, but I really do want another kind of life. But here, too, I seem incapable of doing anything. That I myself at times become tired of my own weakness is, I’m afraid, no consolation to you.”
― Naoya Shiga, A Dark Night's Passing

“It was beyond him to resign himself to some simple, cynical generality about life. Had he been able to do so, he would have been more comfortable. But because he could not, the heaviness in his heart persisted.”
― Naoya Shiga, A Dark Night's Passing

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
― John Cage

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!”
― Émile Zola, The Masterpiece

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
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― Jonathan Lethem

“what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?”
― Jonathan Lethem

“It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude